Southern California water officials are bracing for more uncertainty on the Colorado River after federal regulators unveiled a stopgap management plan that offers little of the long-term stability the region desperately needs.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation last week released a 10-year framework for the river, but rather than settling how California, Arizona, Nevada and the upper basin states will divide increasingly scarce water, the plan simply sets broad outer limits. Actual operating rules will now be revisited every two years, leaving water agencies to plan in short bursts rather than decades, as they have in the past.
The stakes are high. Longtime agreements dating to 2007 — negotiated in under three years and lasting nearly 20 — expire at the end of this year. This time around, talks have dragged on longer and produced far less certainty, even as the river’s reservoirs sink toward historic lows.
Under the new federal framework, California, Arizona and Nevada could eventually face cuts of up to 40% to their shared allocation. The plan also permits Lake Powell releases to drop low enough that they risk breaching legal delivery requirements to downstream states. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Reclamation is expected to soon announce the first two-year operating plan, which sources say will cut California’s Colorado River supply by roughly 10% — about 440,000 acre-feet annually — through 2028. No mandatory reductions are expected for the upper basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, reflecting the federal government’s limited authority to compel cuts there.
For Southern California water managers, the lack of a durable, long-term deal complicates already difficult planning.
“A cut is never fun, but you can deal with it,” said Bill Hasencamp, manager of Colorado River resources for the Metropolitan Water District. “But not if you say, ‘Well, we have a cut here, and then maybe a cut in two years, and maybe another cut in two more years.’ We need to plan for our future, and this deal does not let us do that.”
Metropolitan supplies water to roughly 19 million people across six counties, blending Colorado River supplies with imports from Northern California. When those Northern California supplies ran low during the last drought, six million Southern Californians faced unprecedented restrictions in 2022. Officials worry that Colorado River uncertainty could deepen the impact of the next dry spell.
“There’s a good chance it’ll be as bad as it’s been, and there’s a reasonable chance that it’ll be worse,” said Keith Nobriga, an operations manager at Metropolitan focused on long-term climate planning.
The unresolved river negotiations also complicate decisions on two massive, multibillion-dollar projects: the proposed Sites Reservoir north of Sacramento and the long-debated Delta tunnel, which would move more Northern California water south. Metropolitan’s board, given its financial weight and water needs, will play a major role in whether either project moves forward. The district has already spent hundreds of millions on tunnel planning and roughly $31 million on Sites, but has not committed to funding construction or accepting water from either. A recycled-water initiative with the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, called Pure Water Southern California, adds another variable to the equation.
Nobriga compared the strategy to buying insurance — spending money now to keep projects viable without committing to a specific solution until the need becomes clear.
“We’ll keep these projects alive. We’ll keep looking down the road,” he said. “And if it gets to a point where we really think these droughts are imminent, then we’ll construct and pay the big money for one or several of these projects. We don’t know which ones yet.”
Agricultural interests are similarly caught in limbo. The Imperial Irrigation District, which uses the largest share of California’s Colorado River allocation to irrigate roughly half a million acres of alfalfa, winter vegetables and other crops, struck a deal with the Biden administration worth more than half a billion dollars to fund short-term conservation. That effort helped raise Lake Mead’s level by more than 12 feet, according to Tina Shields, the district’s water manager. But that funding and its regulatory approvals are expiring, and any new conservation program would require fresh environmental review tied to the Salton Sea, which relies on irrigation runoff.
“That needs to be done on a longer term, not on a two-year term,” Shields said, noting it could take a year or more just to negotiate the necessary environmental approvals. The district has not committed to further reductions. “Our perspective is: We’ve done a lot. We’re doing a lot. It’s challenging to do more,” she said.
Federal officials have so far avoided imposing a top-down solution, instead pushing the seven basin states to reach consensus — an approach that hasn’t worked. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has called on Washington to intervene more forcefully. Tensions between negotiators have spilled into public view: Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke has accused the upper basin of failing to offer meaningful cuts, while Colorado’s Becky Mitchell has argued that the lower basin’s overuse created the current crisis.
Jay Weiner, an attorney representing the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe, whose reservation straddles the river, said the federal plan amounts to a temporary fix rather than a real solution. “To a large extent,” he said, “it leaves us at the mercy of this coming winter.”
Elizabeth Koebele, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, said negotiations tend to succeed when officials build strong working relationships — something that appears to be eroding under the strain of repeated crises. “We have been governing in crisis for a long time,” she said, “and so every time we meet at the table, there’s this big problem to solve. The house is on fire.”
Legal action remains a possibility if lower-basin deliveries fall below legally guaranteed thresholds, but both sides risk unpredictable outcomes in court. For now, Southern California and its neighbors are left managing a shared resource one two-year cycle at a time.
“In essence, this federal action has 40 million people living from paycheck to paycheck on water supply,” said Mark Gold, an environmental scientist and Metropolitan Water District board member.
Original source: CalMatters
